Does the Chinese Room argument hold against AI?
There are two broad types of responses to philosophical queries like this.

The first is to make analogies and refer to intuition; one could, for example, actually calculate the necessary size for such a Chinese room, and suggest that it exists outside the realm of intuition and thus any analogies using it are suspect.

The second is to try to define the terms more precisely. If by "intelligence" we mean not "the magic thing that humans do" but "information processing," then we can say "yes, obviously the Chinese Room involves successful information processing."

I tend to prefer the second because it forces conversations towards observable outcomes, and puts the difficulty of defining a term like "intelligence" on the person who wants to make claims about it. If "understanding" is allowed to have an amorphous definition, then any system could be said to have or not have understanding. But if "understand" is itself understood in terms of observable behavior, then it becomes increasingly difficult to construct an example of a system that "is not intelligent" and yet shares all the observable consequences of intelligence.